I just finished a particularly spirited turn behind the wheel of the Guards Red 911 Carrera, and there’s only one possible response: holy friggin’ crap. From the heavyweight clutch to the silken shifter to the buzzsaw exhaust to the brilliant steering, there’s really nothing to fault. (Well, I could perhaps point out all the interior bits shared with the cheaper Boxster/Cayman, but when a car’s this good to drive, the cabin could be molded from reconstituted goat liver and it wouldn’t matter.) And I get why there are more-powerful 911s on the market—hello, profit!—but the 345 horses rumbling in the butt of the base Carrera are more than enough to keep you entertained.

This is simply a great car, and one made even better by the presence of the good-ol’ row-your-own manual. The available PDK gearbox is phenomenal, particularly with the Sport Chrono Package’s Sport Plus mode, but no brand’s cars come alive more with a manual than do Porsche’s. They’ve got a singular mechanical nature that harkens back to the days before electronics dominated every primary control, when all that separated man from machine was a firewall and a pencil-thin shifter. This 911 is like that, and it’s fantastic.

Our 10Best winners will be announced in our January 2010 issue. Please check for it on newsstands on December 5.